Before agentic commerce becomes routine, someone has to answer a basic question: how does a bank or merchant know that AI agent initiating transaction is trustworthy and really acting on your behalf? Three of the biggest names in global payments industry are looking for a joint solution.
Visa, Mastercard and Ant International, international arm of China’s Ant Group, which operates the Alipay ecosystem, announced on September 10 that they were collaborating on a common way to identify and verify AI agents.
These three payment networks together manage a huge share of the world’s card and wallet transactions. So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that each of them has already built its own separate system for recognizing trustworthy agents. The goal of the common initiative is to help card networks, digital wallets, agent platforms and marketplaces streamline how they onboard and identify agents across networks. These processes should be based on shared principles if three payment behemoths solve the interoperability dilemma. At the same time, each company would keep its own verification and decision-making process.
AI agents are steadily moving from suggestions to action in purchases. By 2030, AI agents are expected to handle $3T – $5T worth of global consumer spending. Naturally, the industry is racing to agree on ground rules before that volume arrives. This process of checking an agent’s identity and authority is often called Know-Your-Agent or KYA — a wordplay on the “Know-Your-Customer” checks banks already run on human customers.
Each company had already built its own version of this system. Visa has its Trusted Agent Protocol. There are also Mastercard’s Verifiable Intent and Ant International’s Agentic Mobile Protocol.
The companies are not merging them into one product, surely. Instead, they will work toward shared principles between these three protocols. This way, an agent recognized as trustworthy on one network doesn’t have to prove itself all over again on another.
This isn’t the only time Ant International and Mastercard have worked together this month. The same day, Mastercard launched Wallet Pay, a back-end system that lets regional digital wallets, including Alipay-linked wallets, plug into Mastercard’s global merchant network. With the integration, different wallet software users can spend abroad without opening a new app.
